God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

by Alan Mikhail

Like the Spanish and English before them, the founders of the United States saw Islam where it did not exist. The largest group of Muslims in North America in the mid-eighteenth century were slaves. While estimates vary, Muslims might have constituted up to a tenth of the African slave population of North America between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Yet, given their racial bondage and scattered demography, they clearly posed no “Islamic threat” to the burgeoning American republic. Nevertheless, quite oddly, one of the debates that emerged during the drafting of the Constitution was the question of whether or not a Muslim could be president of the United States. Regarded as the “eternal enemy without,” Muslims in this context (more so than Jews or Catholics) represented one of the primary legal limit-cases for the founders in their conversations about the ideals of citizenship and religious freedom in the young United States. In 1788, the answer to the question of whether an “imagined” Muslim could be president of the United States was a theoretical, though reluctant, yes. As Muslims were virtually absent from the United States in that period, the fact that the shapers of the Constitution even thought to consider the question of a Muslim president points to the shadow threat Islam was conceived to be—an inheritance of America’s European origins.

The nineteenth-century writers who, unlike Lincoln, did eventually cross the Atlantic to the Middle East not only shared this vision of Jerusalem but also articulated the way in which Americans in that period and later came to understand the East—by yoking Muslims to Native Americans.

Above all, neither Melville nor Twain could ever assimilate Islam to their world. The nineteenth-century American writer Washington Irving differed in this regard, as he studied the religion and the history of Islamic Spain and wrote books on these topics employing Arabic and Spanish sources. His rendering of Islam to the American public thus offered both a more scholarly take and a more sympathetic one. But for Melville and Twain, Islam was always other and only enemy, useful for literary and rhetorical purposes, but not worthy of serious or nuanced engagement. For example, the existence of Arab Christians in Bethlehem, Christ’s birthplace no less, was a detail that befuddled and seemingly annoyed Melville: Catholic Arabs? Say not that! Some words don’t chime together, see

In the twentieth century, artistic engagements with the Muslim world continued to perpetuate American notions of uncivilized and evil Muslims, rapacious and licentious Arabs.

In twentieth-century American literature, too, caricatures of Islam continued to flourish. Consider just one example. The Beatnik writers Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg all lived in Morocco for a time in the 1950s and 1960s. Both in their writings and in their personal lives, these paragons of hippie counterculture adopted often racist attitudes toward Moroccans, much closer to those of the dying colonial order around them than to anything resembling the spiritually free future with which they are generally associated. Morocco for these towering American literary figures was a libertine frontier of sex and kif, empire and nostalgia, populated by people who were at best a backdrop, at worst sexual objects to exploit.

AS THE UNITED STATES engaged more directly with real Muslims both in America itself, through immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the Middle East and elsewhere, through travel, Christian proselytizing, expatriate residence, diplomacy, and increasingly war, the earlier, often fantastical fears of Muslims and Islam persisted. Over the course of the last half century, one figure above all others has dominated these fears—the terrorist.

This contemporary fear and demonization come easily because they tap directly into a long history of the perceived threat of Islam in the Americas—which, as I have suggested, began at the first moment Europeans set foot on these continents.

This is not to discount the fact that Muslims have attacked America. They have. The indisputable reality, however, is that Muslims are not modern America’s primary domestic terrorists. That distinction belongs to white nationalists. Since 9/11, white nationalists—nearly all of whom are professed Christians—have accounted for more terrorist attacks than any other group in the United States. Yet, Muslims have received the greatest attention as potential domestic perpetrators of violence against Americans and, in turn, have been regular targets of both discriminatory legislation and hate crime in the United States.

Irrational fantasies about a Muslim threat in the contemporary United States emerge in many ways. For example, between 2010 and 2018, forty-three states introduced 201 bills aimed at banning sharia law as a looming danger to the West. Of course, Selim’s post-1517 reform of sharia courts never entered these discussions. If it had, perhaps state legislators would have come to understand that the overwhelming majority of the resolutions in the millions of cases adjudicated in sharia courts over the centuries have had next to nothing to do with sharia law—either the real law itself or their caricature of it. Perhaps they would have learned that Islamic courts served Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and that Christians and Jews often preferred the Islamic court to their own. Taking a comparative...

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The notion of Muslim terrorists—or, for that matter, throngs of Central American criminals and drug dealers—crossing into the United States from Mexico has been repeatedly refuted by fact, but, again, fantasy does not pay heed to fact. The imaginary moros of 1492 have become today’s imaginary border-crossing Muslim terrorists. We might do well to remember that in the last three decades, it is the United States that has invaded Muslim countries, not the other way around.

Indeed, the idea that Islam is a deep existential threat to the Americas is one of the oldest cultural tropes in the New World. Its history is as long as the history of European colonialism and disease. It must, therefore, be a part of any understanding of the history of the Americas. After 1492, European colonialism, as we have seen, folded the Americas into the long history of European–Islamic relations. Seeing American history in this way allows us to give a more holistic accounting of the American past.

The history of the United States does not begin with Plymouth Rock and Thanksgiving. The first European foothold in what would become the continental United States was not Jamestown, but a Spanish Catholic outpost in Florida. The origins of the American people must obviously include the history of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Americas, West Africans, and the Jewish and Catholic subjects of mainland European polities. This history must also include Muslims, both African slaves and Selim’s Ottomans, for Islam was the mold that cast the history of European racial and ethnic thinking in the Americas, as well as the history of warfare in the Western Hemisphere.

ISLAM IS PROJECTED TO supplant Christianity as the world’s largest religion by the year 2070, so an understanding of Islam’s complex role in world history becomes ever more imperative. We must move beyond a simplistic, ahistorical story of the rise of the West or a facile notion of a clash of civilizations. Without understanding the role of the Ottomans in the history of the last five hundred years, we cannot hope to understand either the past or the present.